I’ve talked in at least 1 other post about how to use the Infra Red remote control of a toy helicopter (Syma s026) for other projects : once the protocol reverse engineered, it’s very easy to program a micro controller to listen to it and I find it very useful to integrate this into any project that needs some wireless remote controlling.

It’s also quite cheap, all you need is an IR receiver and the microcontroller that you alreay use in the given project…

BUT, the more I used it the more I hit one problem : it uses far too much of the MCU ressources, because the remote keeps sending 29 bytes signals all the time and you have to try to intercep them all to check if anything has changed in the commands sent !